The purpose of this research is to examine various aspects of the use of the corset. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which the corset appeared, and then to discuss its position in the culture and the manner in which it was consumed.
The use of the corset, or more exactly its progenitors, has been traced as far back as the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century, the corset was part of the female fashion apparatus, which included the bustle and skirts made of yards of material, as well as a pronounced social component. Lester cites the Dress Reform Movement in Germany in the 1880s, which included a crusade against the corset, "supported by docors and sanitariums alike. The leaders were the most radical, tabooing the corset as an instrument of torture. . . . The innovation succumbed, however, when she who ventured forth was stigmatized as 'the new woman.'" Indeed, by the 1880s, the corset was more, not less, restricting, reaching "from over the bosom to the bottom of the stomach and . . . laced very tightly down the back. It has been described as 'that inevitable ruin to life and beauty.' Ladies determined to be smart were not deterred, and laced themselves into corsets with whalebone, wood or metal panels down the front,and with additional whalebone supports in the sides." By the mid-1880s, "tight-laced corsets were still thought essential, and in some cases even beneficial, though it is difficutl to imagine what benefits could be gained from such constriction of the waist and rib cage." The principal effect of the corset was to produce an unnatural silhouette that "caused both the bust and the lower part of the body in the rear to protrude." By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the corset was part of a whole range of female costume applications that reflected the tendency of women's clothing to become increasingly elaborate, at the same time that men's clothing was being simplifi...